Today is our last day in Australia. We went to collect our visas this morning which were all in order and then got packed. Now I had priced flights to India and they were £1200 each (which obviously I did not want to pay) and would take 20 hours to get there. So I had another search on Google and found Tiger Airways. For the princely sum of £250 each I managed to get flights as far as Chennai (somewhere in India not sure where though??) I then managed to get another two flights for £58 each to Goa and it was only going to take 15 hours so you can imagine I was feeling pretty smug about it. This smugness soon turned to fear when on chatting to Andrew and Anne about rubbish airlines (Ryanair in particular) they told us Australia also has a rubbish airline called Tiger Airways!!! Just great!!! Got to the airport early and noticed the sign above check-in which said please present itinerary and boarding pass and hold luggage no more than 7kg. Now I had not printed our itinerary and I know for a fact my hand luggage is going to be more than 7kg. The realization that our flight price was about to double as our hand luggage was over the limit brought me out in a cold sweat (this is based on previous experience of Ryanair). However we got to the desk and weighed in our hold luggage (I had booked and paid for 2 bags at 20kg each and one was 16kg and the other 14kg). Fortunately she did not ask for our itinerary but smiled nicely at us (not like Ryanair). She then asked to weigh our hand luggage which was over; she still smiled sweetly and asked if we would like to transfer some items or if we would like to check into the hold. I started sweating again at the thought of the cost of this but she continued to smile sweetly and said you can check it for free as you are under your 40kg (I was bloody amazed!) If this is the Ryanair customer service of Australia I may stay. And our flight was on time and they gave us an extra seat (I like to think it was because she was kind but maybe it was because we are fat!!)

And now some facts on our Australia trip:

We have eaten 6 portions of fish and chips each (and never want to see a chip shop again);

Finally tried a Cheesecake (which was lush!);

Swatted 5,000 flies but only managed to kill 1.

We have travelled:

2,600 miles by plane;

900 miles in Andrews lovely Toyota 4 x 4 with all round air conditioning;

5 miles by boat;

50 miles by bus (the price was different every time???)